THE earthquake and tsunami that led to the loss of all electrical power and the meltdown of reactors at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant inevitably put nuclear energy back on the front page. It was the worst accident since Chernobyl in 1986. The early public and political backlash was predictable, but precious little commentary emerged on the vexed issue of what to do with the mass of high-level radioactive waste that presented its own threat in the unfolding disaster.
We urgently need a well-established plan for the “back end” of the nuclear fuel cycle – the spent fuel rods removed after four to six years in the cores of reactors. Initially they are stored in deep pools at the reactor site due to their heat and radioactivity.
But these pools are vulnerable to safety and security threats, such as terrorist attacks, especially when located high above ground level, as at the Fukushima plant, where damage can cause leaks.
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A report that I wrote with colleagues in 2003 estimated that the loss of coolant from a densely packed spent-fuel pool could contaminate land more severely than the Chernobyl accident (Science and Global Security, ).
Japan has a strategy to manage spent fuel: to send it to a reprocessing facility in Rokkasho, in the north of Honshu island, before burying it in a yet-to-be-identified deep repository. But technical and political factors have prevented the country from implementing this strategy.
The Rokkasho facility was supposed to open in 2007 but problems may delay this until 2012 or later. As a result, spent fuel is building up at reactors around the country. Fukushima was no exception: not only did each of its six reactor buildings house spent fuel pools, but the site had an extra pool for overflow and dry casks for holding older spent fuel.
Japan is not alone. Many countries, including the US and the UK, are struggling to find a solution. None has opened a deep geologic repository for spent fuel and high-level waste – the internationally agreed solution – though Sweden, Finland and France are getting closer.
“Many countries, including the US and the UK, are still struggling to find a solution for nuclear waste”
The problem does not end there. Countries with existing nuclear power, such as the US, are extending the lifetimes of reactors without making plans to dispose of the extra spent fuel. Moreover, these same countries are considering or engaging in building new reactors without a waste solution in place.
The United Arab Emirates, a new nuclear power player, was recently harangued by Hans Blix, the former director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, before breaking ground on its reactors.
Why so little progress on this issue? In the nuclear industry, money is made at the “front end” of the fuel cycle – mining uranium, fabricating the fuel and generating electricity. As a corollary, the university nuclear engineering departments that train plant managers and designers put the emphasis on reactor design and safety, with the waste issues rarely addressed.
Nuclear waste will remain a hazard for hundreds of thousands to millions of years. We cannot eliminate it, so minimising exposure by disposal deep below the Earth’s surface is the best solution. Finding a site, completing adequate geologic, hydrologic and geotechnical studies to ensure safety and then operating the repository takes decades. Societies have difficulty dealing with such long time scales. This is especially true for political leaders, who measure time by their term of office.
Compounding this is the difficulty of predicting the behaviour of buried waste thousands to hundreds of thousands of years from now. We judge the safety of existing technologies by their impact on environmental and human health, as measured by toxins in the air, water and sediments. With a repository, no such measurements can be made, only predicted.
But the predictions of geologic processes far into the future are fraught with significant uncertainty, for after all, geology is a retrodictive science, explaining the past and only addressing the future in rough, general terms.
Nonetheless, we must use the best existing knowledge to find waste sites. The alternative, leaving the waste above ground, is no solution and will certainly lead to future radiation exposures as well as security headaches.
The Swedish case provides a glimmer of hope. Relatively early on it began a search for a deep repository site. This failed twice before officials hit upon a workable strategy: approaching communities already comfortable with nuclear technology and allowing them to veto the repository – up to a point. It then proposed two sites, giving an assurance that the most scientifically “sound” would be selected. After submitting a licence application in March 2011 for a repository at Forsmark, .
The point is to keep at it, maintain trust with the affected public, and maintain an open, transparent siting and operations process. Nations that are just beginning a nuclear power programme are in the best situation. They should take heed and begin at the outset, before a shovel hits the ground, to plan for waste management and disposal.
There are no easy solutions, but countries that have nuclear power cannot risk ignoring the waste problem any longer. They must put money and effort into solving it. If they don’t, the nuclear industry and the public may be harmed once more.